On the House floor, lawmakers in favor of the bill touted it as a way to preserve the notion of “one person one vote” and the state’s commitment to quick-turn election results, while detractors framed the proposal as a legislative overreach that again chips away at local municipalities’ home rule.
What is ranked choice?
Ranked choice voting is an alternative to first-past-the-post voting, the standard system used in America wherein voters simply choose their preferred candidate, and the victor is the candidate who gets the most votes. If more than two candidates are running, this can result in a winner who gets more votes than the others, but whom most voters cast a ballot against.
Ranked choice, meanwhile, would allow voters to rank their preferred candidates. Broadly, the higher a voter ranks a candidate, the more points that candidate gets in the count. Tabulation can take multiple rounds, each time eliminating the last-placed candidate and redistributing their first-ranked votes to whomever the voter picked as their second choice candidate, and so on until a winner is decided.
Ranked choice systems are used at the state level in Alaska and Maine, the latter of which uses it in all state-level primaries and all general elections for federal office.
There are no local governments that use ranked choice voting in Ohio, and only a smattering of local governments across the country have implemented the system.
Locally, the city of Riverside in 2024 flirted with the idea of using ranked choice voting, with its city council publicly floating a charter amendment. In the end, the proposal never made it on the ballot.
What would the bill do?
While the bill prohibits ranked choice voting, local governments could theoretically still choose to implement ranked choice. But, by doing so, the municipalities would lose all claims to their payments from Ohio’s local government fund — a pool of money equal to 1.7% of the state’s total tax revenue, disbursed to municipalities on a per capita basis.
Opinions
House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati, told reporters the morning of the vote that he didn’t think the legislature should tell local governments “what they can try.”
“If they want to try something new, great. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, let’s move on,” Isaacsohn. “We talk a lot in the country about how our states and our cities and our communities are laboratories of democracy, that’s how we make progress.”
For Republicans, S.B. 63 was seen as an opportunity to preempt a voting system they describe as complicated and confusing.
“I think most of the ranked choice voting concepts are pretty confusing. I think even the people who want to put them on aren’t quite sure who wins and who makes the finals and all of that,” House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, told reporters before the vote.
Ranked choice would create functional hurdles, too, Montgomery County Board of Elections Director Jeff Rezabek, a former Republican state lawmaker, told this outlet Wednesday. He said the bipartisan board advised Riverside back in 2024 that it wasn’t in full support of ranked choice, and that the county’s equipment wasn’t set up to handle ranked choice voting.
Critics say the current system protects the two-party duopoly. A wave of folks who see ranked choice voting as a way to grant voters a greater voice came to the statehouse a few weeks ago to oppose the proposed ban. They argued that ranked choice could help mend some of the faults inherent in the first-past-the-post system.
This includes David Esrati, a Democrat and local activist and blogger who has run for multiple elected positions. Esrati testified in opposition to the bill earlier this month. Esrati is running for Congress this year, hoping to eventually unseat U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton.
“If the committee’s goal is to increase trust and participation, S.B. 63 moves the opposite direction,” Esrati said. “Ranked choice voting is, at minimum, an attempt to solve a real problem voters experience every cycle: strategic voting, spoiler fear, and the sense that politics is a forced-choice between two bad options. S.B. 63 doesn’t solve those problems. It legislates them into permanence.”
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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.
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